It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  Not that I ever communicated this to her. And I realize this is exactly the reverse of what happened last Christmas. She had something she wanted out of that visit that she never told us, and she was mad when we didn’t read her mind, and I complained that she was nuts, and it looks like I’m the one who’s nuts now. It depresses me. It seems like we each want something that the other one can’t give–I want her to take care of me, and she wants me to take care of her, and for whatever reason, we can’t do that.

  This naturally leads me to the fear that the same thing will happen to me and Rowen. I have been tapdancing around some of the messier details of it all, but I think what’s fucked up about our relationship all goes back to my dad’s death. Or maybe not–I know plenty of people who have fucked up relationships with their parents that haven’t been informed by tragedy, so maybe my little analysis here is just so much bullshit, but here goes.

  See, my mom went a little bit nuts after my dad died. And I do not blame her for this one bit. When she was my age, she was already widowed a year, and she too had been with her spouse since she was a teenager, so I know exactly why it sent her over the edge. But anyway, she went a little bit nuts, basically trying to have the rowdy adolescence or early twentyhood that she never really got to have. And I should say here that she was never an addict, and we always had food, and, miraculously enough given the pitiful sums we lived on, I never felt poor as a child. Which I think may have had to do with some creative financing using credit cards, and my mom still has a problem with that that I sort of chide her for, but I never complained when I was actually getting Christmas presents when she was working for minimum wage. But anyway, she was gone a lot, partying with friends during my middle school years, and maybe this is part of why I got so independent. And I know that she has tremendous guilt about this time, which I wish she wouldn’t because if Kirsten dies I am heading straight up to the park to look for the crack dealers, or more likely I’ll just start buying beer by the keg and suck from the tap until I can’t feel anything anymore, but I wonder if she feels like my independence is this constant rebuke for those times and that’s why it hurts so much.

  What the hell do I know? Not much, except that we can’t stop hurting each other’s feelings. I hate it.

  Santa Claus is Back in Town

  Because it is Christmastime, I start listening to a lot of Christmas music. Well, actually, I have only 3 Christmas albums that I put into heavy rotation: Elvis’ Christmas Album, which I don’t really know the title of because I have all the songs as part of a box set, A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector, and The Jackson 5 Christmas Album. That’s the order in which I listen to them, and I like rock and roll Christmas albums a lot more than sort of more traditional kinds of albums–I have a Sinatra Christmas album that I rarely listen to, and my mom used to always play the Barbra Streisand Christmas album, and what she does to “Jingle Bells”ought to be punishable by public flogging. Rock and roll Christmas albums do have a significant problem, though. This is that everybody figures they are going to write the next big Christmas standard by writing about how they want somebody who’s far away to come home for Christmas, or how they want the estranged lover back for Christmas, or whatever. I initially forget about this and am therefore surprised to find myself moved by “Blue Christmas,” which is a good song but has about as much genuine emotion as, say, an episode of Providence, and there is another song on the Elvis record called “Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me” that also catches me by surprise, but after a few listens I seem to be kind of inoculated to the whole thing, so that by the time I hit “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on the Phil Spector album, I seem to be immune.

  So I just enjoy the records. The thing I listen to the most on the Elvis CD is “Santa Claus is Back in Town,” which is a totally raunchy kind of R&B number in which a the king basically boasts of his earning power and sexual prowess. There is one part that is just unbelievably raunchy where he instructs the listener to hang up her pretty stockings because Santa Claus is coming down her chi-him-ney tonight. I know what he’s talking about. You hear a lot of these salacious double entendres in old songs like this, and I am stunned that they dared to put this on a Christmas album and a little sad that we don’t seem to have much in the way of salacious double entendres in music these days. Much as I love Prince, a song like “Feel U Up,” just to pick a random raunchy one, just doesn’t pack the same clever punch as some of these old R&B numbers. I mean, comin’ down your chimney. Honestly.

  I then shift over to Phil Spector, and I am just stunned by this record every year. I think it just might be one of the best pop records ever. And sure, the CD really reveals the limitations of the original recording–Phil’s famous “Wall of Sound” sounds a lot more like a “55-Gallon Drum of Sound”, but the arrangements are just great. The “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” arrangement is so great that it was stolen by both Bruce Springsteen and the Jackson 5. Except for the shrill “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” there really isn’t a bad song on it–he even manages to make the creepy Oedipal fable “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” kind of palatable. It ends with Phil ranting incoherently over a string arrangement of “Silent Night” about how much the album means to him, and he uses “so” and “very” like 5 times in each sentence, and he comes across as such a freak on this track that it’s sort of surprising that it took him another seventeen years to snap so badly that he pulled a gun on the Ramones.

  The Jackson 5 Christmas Album is uneven but has two outstanding tracks: “Up on the Housetop,” which I play over and over again because it just sounds like pure joy, and “The Little Drummer Boy,” which is a song that always gets me anyway, but if you ever have a chance, you really need to hear what Michael Jackson does to this song. He sings it so well and really packs each “rum-pa-pum-pum” with emotion, and I am not talking about the kind of hysterical overemoting that passes for soul in Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey (and, sadly, latter-day Michael Jackson) songs, I am talking about understated but very moving singing. I am struck as I listen to it that he was just a little kid, and I would guess by the amount of horrible little kid singing you hear that this kind of thing is pretty much impossible to teach, and he really must be some kind of musical genius. So what the hell happened? How did he become the King of Tripe?

  The other thing that strikes me as odd about this is that, as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jacksons didn’t celebrate Christmas, or at least they weren’t supposed to. And yet this album is full of them talking about the stuff they want from Santa. As much as the songs are moving, they are basically a lie–one more cynical Christmas money grab. I have to wonder how this whole thing played down at the Kingdom Hall, and when I think about these kids in the recording studio feigning Christmas joy and then going home and being told that celebrating Christmas is a sin, it gets kind of easy to see how they’re such fucked up adults.

  And speaking of fucked up adults, that just about describes me. My Christmas spirit is about as fake as Jermaine Jackson’s at this point. I am listening to the music, but it just isn’t getting me there. Kids at school ask me what I want for Christmas, and I say, “my wife back,” and they kind of don’t know what to say, and I know it’s a crappy thing to say to a teenager who is trying to make conversation, but it’s true. I just don’t give a shit about Christmas, and it’s a damn good thing that Kirsten bought all of our presents before she went in the hospital, because I just can’t bring myself to shop. I am sort of reminded of the Kinks song “Father Christmas” where the poor kids beat the shit out of Santa and take his money and basically say in that cynical Kinks way that Christmas is a luxury, and while I certainly have the money, I don’t have the energy to care about this holiday, though I wish I could buy into the whole idea that it’s a time of rebirth and hope. I do feel hopeful that they will save Kirsten’s life–but mostly I just want to sleep for a week.

  Driving over to the hospital one day, I hear “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” which I a
lways liked much better than any of the other treacly benefit songs, because it at least has a little bit of an edge. Though even in high school we thought about how many of the famine victims the song was about were not Christians, and how maybe “Do They Care it’s Christmas” was a more appropriate question, but anyway, the line I am thinking of they give to Bono, who yowls, “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you,” and while I do not claim to compare my fat ass to a famine victim, I also sort of feel like my family is a walking (or in Kirsten’s case, lying in bed) billboard for that sentiment at this time of year which is so very very special to so very many people, as Phil Spector might say.

  Touch Me

  After my mom takes off, she leaves behind one of those shower scrubby things, three earrings and the new U2 album,(which ironically enough is called All That You Can’t Leave Behind) which she bought for herself but I quickly appropriate since she left it here. I have it in the CD player on my way to the hospital the day we get out for vacation. It’s a really great record, and it’s nice to see that they believe they can do what they’re good at again and that they don’t have to be some hyper-ironic techno band, or whatever the hell they were trying to be for the last five years. Everybody knows they don’t have a sense of humor, and dammit, we like it that way.

  So I am listening to it, and it is great but not exactly the cheeriest thing you’ve ever heard because it’s about real adult topics like dying and stuff, which admittedly might not have been the best choice for me, but I’m listening to it anyway. I stop for lunch at this burrito place and read a little bit of a book my mom left behind, which is Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, which is a crime novel set in Boston, but it is also horribly depressing because its about these people with horribly depressing dead-end lives and then somebody gets killed, and their shitty lives get even worse than they were before.

  All of this is to say that I am not in the greatest mood on this particular day, and when I get to the hospital, I give Kirsten a hug, and I just start to cry. This is not because I am sad about the treatment or anything–she has been in the trough, but she is on the way up now, her counts are coming up and so are her spirits, and she is much less nauseous, so they don’t have to give her Ativan and Benadryl anymore, so she seems much more like herself. It’s just the physical sensation of holding her feels like an electric shock. I just immediately feel all over my body how much I miss her, how much it hurts all the time to not be able to touch her, and I get through most days without even realizing it, but then today, all the sudden, it hurts so much I could cry. So I do.

  Merry Motherfuckin’ Christmas

  My first year of teaching, I had a rather difficult class, and one kid in this class was named Sun (he had a brother named Moon), and as Christmas break approached, Sun used to enter class every day–well, the days when he wasn’t high–singing a little ditty that went like this: “MER-ry MOTHERf(glottal stop)n CHRISTmas,” and I would protest feebly, and he would argue that he didn’t actually swear, and while this shows what an iron-fisted disciplinarian I am in the classroom, it has also been haunting me as Christmas approaches this year. I just hear this kid’s voice and his singsong obscenity in my head whenever Christmas comes up.

  I am convinced it’s going to be easy. Though I have been listening to the music, I have not been getting myself psyched up for the holiday or anything–what I’m most looking forward to is a little bit of extra sleep. As the vacation begins, Kirsten’s folks take Rowen for a day, and I end up going out with my friend Petey to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is, well, it’s getting rave reviews, most of whom seem to be coming from non kung-fu afans who think it’s really cool that they fight on wires in this movie, and it is really cool, but at the same time it’s nothing I haven’t seen in twenty other movies, and plus, the director Ang Lee has brought a little too much Sense and Sensibility to this, if you ask me. There are many scenes with people sitting around talking in beautiful settings, and that’s fine, but actually I want to watch these people kicking each other’s asses a little more and talking about the nature of fate a little less. I have been contemplating the nature of fate plenty lately–what I haven’t done is kicked the shit out of any old enemies, and that’s what I came to the movies to see. The movie is half an hour too long, and people who don’t like action movies will like it because it’s got enough boring parts interspersed with the excellent fights to make it seem like Quality Filmmaking. I say less talk, more rock, but this movie will probably have tons of awards by the time you read this, so what the hell do I know, except a boring movie when I see one.

  Anyway, the next day is Christmas Eve, and I go and hang out in Kirsten’s room for about two and a half hours, which is probably the longest visit we’ve had yet, and we have a very nice time just sitting there and watching football, even though Kirsten is a little depressed because her counts are not where she would like them to be, especially if she’s going to be on track to go home in three days. When her granulocytes, (whatever the hell those are) get to 500 (what is the unit of measure here? I have no idea. Is that 500 total? 500 per milliliter, per liter, per square inch?), she can have the door to her room open. She sort of thought she’d be there by now, but she’s only at 350.

  Which is just as well, as it turns out, because this time I’m really sure, somebody is dying right across the hall. The hall is chock full of grieving relatives as I am trying to microwave something for Kirsten to eat, and I have to shove past about ten crying people three different times, and when I see a doctor in sweats come in and start hugging people, I know for sure. And I look at all these red-eyed people and feel relatively lucky by comparison. I am actually having a pretty nice afternoon, running around microwaving stuff, sipping Diet Coke through a straw tucked under my mask while watching the Patriots at least give Miami a game, which is more than they’ve been able to do most of the season, and I look at these people and feel guilty for my cheerful bustling.

  And then, right before I am leaving, I remember that it’s Christmas Eve, and these people will now always remember standing in this hospital hallway crying while some annoying short bald guy says excuse me every two minutes while someone they love dies. This is their brand new freshly-minted Christmas memory. Merry motherfuckin Christmas.

  I head down to Kirsten’s folks’ house, where Rowen is glad to see me, and after she goes to bed I stay up reading the chess book my friend Eric sent me for Christmas and sadly realizing that I really will never be any good at chess, but enjoying reading about it nonetheless. I have been playing chess for a little over a year now, and while I still suck terribly, I find I can usually beat my students, who, in typical teenage fashion, are way too aggressive and bring the queen out on like the second move, while the tired old man bides his time and usually wins. Except when playing other tired old men with even a little bit of skill, in which case I get shellacked, usually in embarrassing fashion.

  Christmas morning with Kirsten’s folks arrives, and it is fine, and the best part is the stockings, because they have stuff like pens and dried mushrooms and small kitchen implements in them, and I always enjoy and get use out of the stocking stuff. Rowen gets a ton of gifts but is a distant second to Kirsten’s brother’s wife, who I guess is my sister-in-law, but I sometimes wish I spoke Chinese or some other language that reflected the importance of kinship and would therefore have a different word for Kirsten’s sister and Kirsten’s brother’s wife, but anyway, Keri gets a boatload of stuff from her parents, who are not here but have mailed a ton of stuff from Virginia. And this is like an ad for the voluntary simplicity movement, because she literally has so many gifts piled on the table in front of her that none of us can see her, and ok, she’s a small woman, but still. Each present does not seem to bring her increased joy, but rather increased annoyance. She gets cranky after about the third one.

  I have been cranky since before we started opening presents, because this whole thing just feels wrong. I had convinced myself that I didn’t care, that
this Christmas was just going to pass, was just going to be another day, you know, no big deal, but as I sit here on Christmas morning I feel terrible. Where tis my wife? Why am I here with her family without her? I have terrible flash-forwards to future joyless Christmases without Kirsten, and that’s bad, but this one is bad enough, and all those stupid pop songs I complained about were right–I don’t give a shit about presents or anything else–all I want is my wife back, and everything else can go to hell.

  I call Kirsten, and she is in tears, and I’m crying too, and merry motherfuckin Christmas, ho-ho-ho this holiday bites. Fortunately there is some kind of conspiracy among the nurses on Kirsten’s floor to break the rules and allow Rowen to visit. There is a big sign on the door that says no children under six are allowed, and they had initially told us that they only break that rule when a parent is dying on the floor, but I guess the Christmas spirit has taken over, so Rowen and I head up to the hospital and, under the supervision of Kirsten’s primary nurse, who of course I have a crush on,(not in a cheesy, naughty-nurse Playboymagazine type of way, but, you know, she is kind of attractive and she takes good care of all of us and laughs at Kirsten’s jokes, so what’s not to like?) we wash up and get Rowen some spiffy Smurfette gloves, and in to the bubble we go. Kirsten is sitting up in bed, pale, bald and smiling. “Hi sweetie!” she says when Rowen comes in. She is really too sick to get out of bed and greet us, and so I expect Rowen to shout “Mommy!” and go running into her arms, but I guess this is weird for her, so she sort of turns into my leg and clings to me.